> On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.

I think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, but that doesn't mean there's less signal; there's just a lot more noise.

That's only relevant if the noise gets filtered out. I think there's a lot of evidence that our most prevalent platforms filter content for how much attention it can hold: which is to say, for revenue or less pure motivations. This is probably considered "quality" content, by some incredibly cynical metric of quality, and maybe the adoption of that cynical approach is the underlying change that has occurred on the internet in the last twenty years.

the Internet is now being used by 4 billions people, so it basically mimics humanity

Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity

I still believe it's relatively easy to find high quality material, even for amateurs. For example, I can watch live train yard cams nowadays on Youtube (Virtual Railfan on Youtube), and watch people who know what they are doing do live coding. I'm definitely losing myself in a multitude of options but I won't balme it on the accessibility of modern Internet.

20 years ago there were definitely less garbage on the Internet, and less gems as well.

But I definitely agree with the movie part. We still get a few good ones here and there but it's kind of rare nowadays :(

I don’t know about the content argument. Yes it’s true that there is a lot of low quality content out there. And that low quality content drowns out the good stuff. But there are some absolute gems out there - things that didn’t exist 20+ years ago. Khan academy for example is a treasure of amazing free content.

Completely disagree, there is probably 100x more content now compared to 10-15 years ago, sure garbage also increased but excellent content is there and internet of today is better overall.

I think, the old internet did not have much original content and we consumed what was available pre-internet but without the scarcity. The original ones were created by privileged people in relatively tiny community.

The current internet content is made for the internet. A lot of great things were made of course but I think the optimisation is diluting it into mediocracy. Every single day it gets more and more optimised for revenue or influence through time dominance. If you pay for it, it is designed to keep you pay for it(not necessarily pay for it and consume it but keep paying. Games are mostly freemium where you pay if you want to enjoy, movie subscription services will pile sh*t in font of you to give you the impression of endless content, optimize scenarios for retention etc.). If it is free, it is designed to pay by proxy(purchase something or give political power to an interest group).

The past internet I remember was one of absolute noise search results and big invisible blobs of SEO text. To find something, you had to know already where to look.

Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply wasn't on the internet yet.